🌏 Life Goes On

Life goes on, but you wish it went someplace better.

Source Unknown

🌿Sincerely

It was meant sincerely, and like all things sincerely intended, the Boomers had to turn him into a sarcastic joke to show they could see right through all the things that were wrong with the world. Like sincerity, I suppose.

🕒 Everything is Fleeting

Time, and our interaction with time, and the way in which we are all ultimately overmatched and worn down by time, and the notion of cinema as a means of sculpting with time: these and other aspects of temporality are at the heart of “Boyhood.” Time is the core around which all of this movie’s musings on childhood and parenthood are woven. It’s the river down which the scenes and characters travel without consciously realizing that they are on individual journeys that all have the same ending. If life is “about” anything, it’s about realizing and accepting that fact: that everything is fleeting. Time gives birth and nourishes and then obliterates as it moves ahead, like the family which, in an early scene, prepares to move out of a house by covering murals and hand-lettered height charts with white paint. The film ends and the credits come up and you ask the same question that you ask at the end of an evening spent with old, dear friends: where did the time go?

🌲🌲🌲 Enlightened Environmentalists

The Bay Area, on the whole, is a case study in how liberalism – and I mean specifically liberalism, rather than socialism/leftism – fails in practice. The city, the peninsula, Silicon Valley, the exurban East Bay, the north bay, and even great swathes of Oakland and Berkeley are places where hyperindividualist liberalism is the governing ideology. Although the residents here mouth statements about inclusivity and acceptance in the abstract, they are completely gung ho about avoiding all of those things should they appear to threaten either property values or creature comforts when actually realized. Moreover, the idea of collective action is absolutely anathema to them, since individual choice is the only version of freedom comprehensible to them. This is how a bunch of property owners in wretched little towns like Palo Alto and Menlo Park, all of whom think of themselves as enlightened environmentalists, end up frantically trying to sabotage high speed rail lines in order to protect the sanctity of their large backyards. This is how Marin county ends up as a hotbed for measles outbreaks triggered by selfish antivaxxers. This is how they all find themselves either comfortable with or totally oblivious to Tom Steyer’s hedge fund’s use of economic force majeure to expel long-term residents of West Oakland to make way for white people – after all, if the people being foreclosed upon after being stuck with predatory loan terms had simply freely chosen not to get scammed, they’d still have their houses, right?